Where did the late George H. W. Bush stand on Israel?

George H.W. Bush will go down in Jewish History as the American president who forced Israel into a subservient position and endangered millions of Jews.

Ariel Natan Pasko, 04/12/18 07:22 | updated: 17:59

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Ariel Natan Pasko

Ariel Natan Pasko, an independent analyst and consultant, has a Master's Degree in International Relations & Policy Analysis. His articles appear regularly on numerous news/views and think-tank websites and in newspapers.

“Go to hell.” That’s what George W. answered a reporter, when questioned about what he planned to tell the Israelis, as he was about to leave on his 1998 Middle East trip. Was he joking? Let’s remember, George W. previously had said in 1993, “heaven is open only to those who accept Jesus Christ,” while discussing his decision to become “born again,” asr eported in the Houston Post at the time.

And let’s not forget his heavy campaigning in Michigan (home of the largest Arab-American community) before the 2000 election, his family’s oil interests, and deep ties with the Arab community in America and the Middle East. Then, there was George W’s open support for a Palestinian state during his presidency, the first American president to come out of the closet on the issue.

As the saying goes, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

So, after a cursory look at George W. Bush’s attitudes to Jews, and Israel, let’s look at his recently deceased father, George H.W. Bush, his friends and family.

Well, for starters, there’s the company H.W. kept, for example James Baker who said, “F*** the Jews, they didn’t vote for us anyways.” James Baker was George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State.

Why didn’t H.W. criticize Baker’s statement?

And H.W. let Baker publicly berate Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir, “When you’re serious about peace, call us,” giving the number for the White House switchboard. Later, as a friend of the family, he acted as a political advisor to Jeb Bush, when he ran for governor in Florida.

George H.W. Bush will go down in Jewish History as the American president who forced Israel into a subservient position and endangered millions of Jews.

During the 1991 Gulf War, Shamir wanted the communication codes, so that Israeli pilots could contact their American counterparts, and avoid a friendly fire scenario. Bush refused, forcing Shamir’s hand, not to respond to Saddam Hussein’s scud missile fire on Israel. Bush sent patriot missiles, and insisted that Israel let America take care of it. That may be the main turning point, in the Israeli mentality, from “we fight our own wars,” to a growing sense of dependence on Uncle Sam.

As the late Rabbi Meir Kahane quipped, “Once we were people who had faith in the burning bush, and now we depend upon George Bush?”

H.W. also pushed off an Israeli $10 billion aid request for loan guarantees, to help settle the million plus Soviet Jewish refugees flooding Israel, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. He insisted Israel stop building “settlements,” and extorted from Shamir, an agreement that Israel would participate in the 1991 Madrid “peace” Conference. Which led to the Oslo Process, the Palestinian Authority, Arafat’s return, and the Death Machine, Israelis suffer with today. After a more cooperative prime minister was elected in Israel in 1992, Yitzhak Rabin, the loan guarantees went through.

But the George HW’s apple didn’t fall far either…

The accusations against HW’s father, Sen. Prescott Bush, go well beyond dislike for Jews and discriminatory practices that were typical of New England WASP culture back then. It seems his father was involved with Hitler’s financiers in the later 1920s and 1930s.

Prescott Bush was co-founder and a director of at a New York bank, Union Banking Corp. (UBC), where German businessmen who supported the Nazis, stashed away millions. According to documents from the US National Archives made public in 2003, Bush was still a director at the bank, when its assets were frozen under the Trading With the Enemy Act in 1942.

It seems, the UBC was not so much a “bank” at all, but a “clearing house” for the many assets and enterprises, of German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, who later admitted to his role, in helping to finance the Third Reich.

The documents also reveal that Prescott Bush worked for, and was later a partner in, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH). By the late 1930s, both BBH, which claimed to be the world's largest private investment bank, and UBC, had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Nazi Germany, feeding and financing Hitler’s military build-up.

On October 20, 1942, the alien property custodian, seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. After checking their books, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation, and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. In November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush’s ventures, was also seized.

Bush owned an interest in the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Jewish slave labor from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

Two former Jewish slave laborers, at Auschwitz, brought a class action petition to The Hague, for damages against the Bush family, “From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented.”

Their argument: On January 22, 1944, Pres. Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order, calling on the government to take all measures to rescue European Jews. The lawyers in the petition claimed the order was ignored, because of pressure brought by a group of large American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director. The petition went nowhere.

John Loftus, a former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor in the 70s, who is associated with the Florida Holocaust Museum in St. Petersburg, said that Prescott Bush’s business dealings were similar to what other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.

They bought Nazi stocks.

“This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich’s defense industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted. The UBC was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen,” Loftus explained. Loftus has said that the late senator's actions, should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

It seems that the money Prescott Bush made from all his business dealings with the Nazis, including benefiting from Jewish slave labor, helped to establish the Bush family fortune, and set up its political dynasty.

Connecting the dots.

You have George H.W. Bush’s father, Prescott, possibly a Nazi sympathizer, in the least, having accumulated a fortune working with them, financially benefiting from Jewish slave labor too. And this, even after the US enters the war against Nazi Germany. Post-war he runs for politics, gets elected senator, and can also set up his kids to run.

Then, H.W., who weakens Israel’s defense posture, by forcing dependence on America. He withholds loan guarantees to help Israel absorb the massive wave of Soviet Jews (said to be the equivalent of America absorbing France). And, he pushes Israel into the false peace process, that began at the Madrid Conference in 1991, endangering Israel.

And HW’s son, George W. Bush, who doesn’t think Jews will get an afterlife, and admits that America, Israel’s “ally,” the “even-handed broker,” wants the “peace process” to end with a Palestinian state, further endangering over six million Jews in Israel.